In Greece, When Everything Grinds to a Halt, Nobody Is Surprised

ATHENS—If it's Monday in Athens, it must be radio technicians and pension-fund employees. On Tuesday, it's lawyers and pharmacists.

Strikes, work slowdowns and protest marches have become so common in crisis-hit Greece that it can be hard to keep track of who is demonstrating when, where and against what.

Who's On Strike Today?

Steelworkers demonstrated outside the Labor Ministry in Athens on July 23, just days after police broke up a nine-month strike against steelmaker Hellenic Halyvourgia. Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images

"Every morning when you wake up, you check the weather, you switch on the news and you see what strikes are happening that day," said
Yannis Ifantis,
a 42-year-old travel agent in the capital. "It's one of the absurdities of life in Greece."

Navigating the chaos caused by the stoppages has become a central fact of life for Athenians, who face longer commutes and myriad other disruptions to their daily routines—from restrictions on where they can shop to whether their airline will be flying.

Around the city's central Syntagma Square, a main protest venue near Parliament, hotels, department stores, restaurants and shops are accustomed to closing abruptly in the middle of the day and pulling metal shutters down over their doors and windows until demonstrators leave.

On Wednesday, hundreds of strikers blocked traffic for a while at one end of the square, holding up a makeshift clothesline with underwear hanging on it. Writing said: "Take these as well," a complaint about austerity measures that they feel have already stripped them of everything else.

Frustrated by the nonstop dislocations,
Antonis Gouzias,
a 32-year-old computer programmer, his sister, Athina, and a few friends started a website that publishes detailed daily strike schedules to help people plan their lives.

"We were fed up with trawling through other websites and newspapers to find out who was on strike and how we could get to work," Mr. Gouzias said.

ENLARGE

A cyclist wheels his bike through a subway pass at the closed Doukisis Plakentias metro station during a 24-hour strike in Athens in January.
Bloomberg News

These days, their site, apergia.gr (the name means strike), averages about 30,000 hits a day, Ms. Gouzias said. Traffic peaks when there are transit disruptions, she said. The one-day record is 230,000. Over the past three months, they have had three million unique visitors—in a country with 10.8 million residents.

Mr. Ifantis, the travel agent, said he frequently consults the apergia site to plot his journey from home in the northern suburbs to his office in the downtown neighborhood of Pangrati. Normally, the trip takes an hour. On strike days, the travel time often doubles.

Usually he takes a bus. When the buses are on strike, he takes a subway and then has to hoof it about two miles to get to work. When the train isn't running either, he tries to catch a ride into town with a neighbor through the strike-snarled traffic.

Most demonstrations are much smaller—and peaceful—though still troublesome. Some border on the surreal.

A sit-in by civil servants in the northeastern city of Thessaloniki has kept the government there from collecting €2 million ($2.6 million), in badly needed fees, according to the mayor,
Yiannis Boutaris.

ENLARGE

Not in Session: A strike emptied a courthouse in September.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The Greek finance ministry this year has had to extend the deadline for filing personal income-tax returns three times, in part because of strikes by tax collectors. Infant formula is almost impossible to get when druggists—the only retailers allowed to sell it—shut down.

Parliamentary clerks even walked off the job in November during a critical vote on new austerity measures. Lawmakers caved in to their demands after less than 10 minutes, moving to exempt them from pay and pension cuts imposed on other government workers.

When journalists walk off the job, TV viewers mostly get recycled entertainment shows instead. One big station reruns old newscasts, giving bleary-eyed, early-morning watchers an odd sense of déjà vu.

"The frequent strikes make our lives hell," said
Panagiotis Kostopoulos,
38, a sales agent. And strike-day traffic, which can double his commuting time to four hours a day, isn't the worst part of it, the father of two said.

"My wife, who also works in the private sector, has lost nine days' pay in the past year because she had to stay home with the children when the teachers went on strike" and public schools closed, Mr. Kostopoulos said.

Even the holidays aren't providing much respite this year. In mid-December, farmers started using their tractors to block highways in protest against a new tax law. And performances of "The Nutcracker" ballet and "Little Red Riding Hood" at Greece's national opera were canceled this month after technical and support staff declared an impromptu three-day walkout.

Corrections & Amplifications Greece has 10.8 million residents, according to a preliminary estimate from a May 2011 census. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said Greece has 10 million residents.

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